As of today, in Romania, free speech is a felony. Or it is?

Romania didn’t haul a bomb-maker into court. It didn’t collar a man with a map, a gun and a box of matches. The powers indicted a voice. They put “complicity to incitement to overthrow the constitutional order” on a sheet of paper and tried to turn opinion into insurrection. That’s not justice! It’s regime maintenance with a prosecutor’s letterhead…in a country which claims to have stopped being communist 36 years ago.

It may be that most readers outside Eastern Europe have never heard the name Călin Georgescu. But, in Romania, he is a polarizing public figure. A conservative-leaning civic activist and commentator whose speech is stubbornly simple: the country belongs to its citizens, not to a professional class that treats democratic consent like an afterthought. He fills town halls without party machinery, speaks in the idiom of self-reliance and national dignity, and has become a lodestar for Romanians who believe their democracy has been captured by an insulated elite.

This week, prosecutors moved to make him something else: a defendant.

According to leaks to a Romanian television, Georgescu is being sent to trial on the charge of “complicity to incitement to overthrow the constitutional order.” There is, as yet, no public indictment, a fact that matters in any rule-of-law country. What exists are off-the-record briefings, breathless studio panels, and a carefully staged press conference at the General Prosecutor’s office about a “hybrid war,” which unfolded the very day the Georgescu news broke. The choreography is impossible to miss.

First off, the worst is the charge itself, a Matryoshka doll of criminality: “complicity” to “instigation” to “overthrow” the constitutional order. A crime about a crime about a possibility. Such catch-all formulations are the favored tools of states that cannot prove violence, so they criminalize vocabulary. They cannot point to a conspiracy, so they police conversation. The test in any democracy, especially one bound by the European Convention on Human Rights, is necessity and proportionality. Does the speech in question present a clear, imminent risk to constitutional order? Or does it embarrass those who claim to protect it? When prosecutors inflate “hybrid war” into an omnibus justification to surveil, silence, and punish, democracy is not defended; it is hollowed out from within.

But, a liberal order survives on a single hard rule: you answer arguments with arguments, not with indictments.

The timing is as cynical as it is obvious. On the very day the Prosecutor General’s office stages a press conference about “actions against hybrid war,” a new case against a prominent critic appears, conveniently packaged for evening talk shows. This signals to citizens, journalists, academics, and activists that the perimeter of permissible speech will be drawn by the same officials who benefit from narrowing it.

Spare us the pieties about “no one being above the law.” The true question is whether the law still stands above politics. Recent public complaints by President Nicușor Dan about the performance of the Prosecutor General and the leadership of the National Anticorruption Directorate were not the random grumblings of a distracted head of state. They were an alarm bell about an accountability system that has drifted off course. When the presidency questions prosecutorial independence and, in response, prosecutors stage-manage “hybrid war” theatrics and press-driven indictments, the optics are not of an independent justice system…they are of a political police in a very expensive suit.

For a non-Romanian audience, a sketch is in order. Georgescu is not a party boss or a backroom financier. He is a public intellectual turned movement figure, known for a sovereignty-first worldview, skepticism of supranational tutelage, and a gift for making complicated themes sound like common sense. Whether you agree with him or not, his appeal is real: ordinary taxpayers who feel overruled, over-lectured, and under-represented hear in his message something most modern politics withholds, a promise that the country will listen to them first.

That is precisely what makes him dangerous to a complacent establishment. Extremists are easy to isolate. Articulate patriots with a following are not. The surest tell that a government has lost its nerve is when it tries to turn a dissenter into a criminal.

“Complicity to incitement to overthrow the constitutional order” is a lawyer’s way of giving the state a very long arm and a very wide net. It’s elastic, it’s ambiguous. It is the kind of clause that, in the wrong hands, converts strong language into a felony and vigorous opposition into a security file. If prosecutors have real evidence of criminal plotting, they should publish it, every line, every exhibit, every transcript. If what they have are angry speeches and unpopular opinions, then this is a political case wearing judicial robes.

The method is as worrying as the substance. Announcing a high-profile prosecution through “sources” while holding a podium about “hybrid threats” is not how confident democracies behave. It is how brittle ones try to set a narrative before a judge ever sees a page.

Why this matters beyond Bucharest?

Romania is a member of the European Union and NATO, so, what it normalizes will not stay within its borders. If a government can criminalize speech by calling it “incitement,” every government can. If prosecutors become the sharp end of a political spear, separation of powers collapses into a single clenched fist. And if citizens learn that the price of skepticism is surveillance and summonses, they do not become more moderate; they become more mistrustful. Democracies do not die only from mobs alone, they also die from quiet procedural suffocation, one “exceptional” case at a time.

The language of “hybrid war” is a telling accessory here. Across the continent, that phrase has become a solvent that blurs vital lines: between protest and subversion, dissent and disloyalty, noisy politics and covert plots. Of course European states face real threats from hostile actors; of course law enforcement must act on authentic conspiracies. But the fact that malign campaigns exist is not a license to declare domestic opponents foreign proxies, or to convert every sharp sentence into a security incident.

The damage is not theoretical. This kind of case chills legitimate speech far beyond the courtroom. It tells students to keep their questions to themselves, journalists to pare back investigations, civil society to self-censor. It trades the hard, honest work of persuasion for the cheap thrill of punishment. It treats citizens as a threat vector to be “managed,” not as the sovereigns they are meant to be.

Romania has walked this road before, and it ends in darkness: in “crimes of opinion,” in files that stretch longer than verdicts, in the smug certainty of officials who believe the state is their private cudgel. An EU member state that still invokes the ghosts of totalitarianism to score points against opponents cannot, in the next breath, reach for the very tools those regimes used and expect to be taken seriously in Brussels or Strasbourg. You cannot speak the language of liberty abroad while practicing the grammar of fear at home.

Here is what a government confident in its legitimacy would do now. It would release the full indictment, it would welcome independent scrutiny from Parliament’s oversight committees, from the Ombudsman, from the Superior Council of Magistracy. It would invite the Venice Commission and OSCE experts to review whether national security statutes are being contorted to prosecute speech.

And if the evidence against Călin Georgescu amounts to rhetoric, association, and thought, then the case should be dropped publicly, unequivocally, and with an apology. A confident democracy does not fear words, it doesn’t not hide behind the fog of “hybrid war” to mask a domestic failure of governance;. What is toes is face  its critics and convince them…or accepts being replaced by those who can.

Romania is better than governance by insinuation, better than prosecutors who moonlight as press officers, better than a presidency that tolerates both. The constitutional order is not protected by criminalizing speech. It is protected by citizens who still believe their rights are more than decorations and who refuse to be ruled by rumor.

Călin Georgescu will likely walk into a courtroom with nothing but his words and his nerve. The government, in its impatience, has already given him something he did not have last week: a martyr’s aura. That was their choice. But the rest is ours. We can tolerate a politics where dissenters are suspects, or we can insist on a politics where voices are answered, not shackled.

This story is about a man, and it is also a mirror. If a European democracy in 2025 can call a speech a coup, no one who values freedom should look away.

Drop the theater. Publish the facts. Stop prosecuting thought. If the state will not defend the Constitution from this kind of legal vandalism, then citizens, and Europe, must.

By I. Constantin